Considering the grave inclination towards mobile usage, each business is looking to build a digital product that satiates the mobile users’ growing fondness for applications on mobile platforms.
And the first step to building any new digital product is to bring together a passionate product development team. This team is responsible for not just validating the idea of product launching and its promotion but also giving the idea a shape in terms of coding, photography, and programming to launch a fully working product. Initially, the best way to promote the product to a larger audience is by getting the professional amazon product photography service.
For any startup, here’s what a typical product development team looks like:
- Project Manager: One who analyzes the requirement and ensures that everything gets done as per the software scope.
- Business Analyst: One who performs complete research to ensure the product idea succeeds in the market.
- 1-2 developers: Those who write the codes and build the complete product from scratch to turn the idea into a working product.
- QA Engineer: One who keeps a tab on the quality of the codes and tests the functionalities to ensure seamless work.
However, this team works fine until the startup is in the initial product development phase and focusing on bringing a market fit through its minimum viable product. But once the product becomes a market fit and requires new functionalities, integrations, platform launches, etc, the startup needs to start scaling the product development team. Here, we have highlighted some quick tips to scale a passionate product development team.
Know Why You Are Scaling
The first and crucial tip that will help you scale a passionate product development team is to never push the goals in hindsight while scaling. Before you start scaling, make sure you have listed down all the goals that you want to achieve with the newbies on board.
The goals could be anything from increasing development speed, adding new expertise, minimizing the load on current team members, taking up new projects to expanding onto a new platform, or any other reasons.
While scaling the team, keep the goal in mind. That would help you streamline and narrow down your search to help you find the right experts.
Look For Remote Developers As Extended Team
While most companies look for in-house developers when it comes to scaling, hiring remote developers can be a more cost and time-effective way to plug the gap. Remote work is already the norm today and hiring remote devs as an extension to the in-house team can be a great approach.
There are several software outsourcing companies that are offering remote developers as an extension to their offshore software development services. These developers work dedicatedly on your product development project and collaborate and communicate as your in-house team members would.
Combine Efforts When Scaling
A mistake that many companies make while scaling their product teams is to over-expand a single team. This leads to overburdened and overwhelmed teams. A great tip to overcome this challenge is to combine efforts while scaling and break down the team into smaller parts.
For example, you can start by pairing the in-house developer with the new developer that you hire. This will not just give the newbies a team where they can openly communicate their issues and experiences in the role without any fear of being misunderstood. Moreover, both the newbies and the existing product members have someone with whom they can combine their skills and efforts to achieve the set goals.
Take The Organic Approach To Growing
Many companies feel that while scaling a product development team, a valid approach is to create a new team. They build a completely new team for the scaling part where they have a new project manager, developers, designers, QA engineers, and others. However, this approach might end up with a team that is totally new and an existing product team that has worked hard on taking the product where it is today.
The ideal approach while scaling a product development team is to scale organically. Do not add new team members in bulk. Take it slow. Add a new member, analyze their impact on the overall results produced. Scale organically and slowly by adding new members and creating new development teams as you continue scaling. This way, you have product development teams that are aware of how work happens at your organization and are well aware of the processes in the product development to handle new projects or bigger assignments.
Scale When The Time Is Right
This one is an important tip for all the startups planning to scale their passionate product development team. With the MVP receiving good feedback, you might feel that it’s time to start scaling. But scaling prematurely could bring more challenges than simplifying or speeding up tasks.
A startup product team should be small and close-knitted until the product is set to become a market-fit and has new versions for expansion. Until one is working on the MVP development, the smaller a product team, the better for the startup. The team should be able to collaborate and know each aspect of the product from scratch. The MVP is the simplest product and so should be the code. Scale only when you need to expand the architecture or release new versions of the product or spread to new platforms, etc.
Scaling a product development team can be challenging for many startups, considering how impactful it is for their products. However, following the above-mentioned tips, one can easily scale a team effectively.
All you need to do is make sure you hire team members after complete security and build a team that is excited with your product idea. When scaling a product, make sure that you are scaling only when the time is right and as per your product requirements. Don’t overburden your current product team but also ensure that you do not add newbies without analyzing their impact and how they mold with the current team.
About The Author
Tanya Kumari leads the Digital Marketing & Content for Classic Informatics, a global web and custom software development company. She is an avid reader, music lover and a technology enthusiast who likes to be up to date with all the latest advancements happening in the techno world. When she is not working on her latest article on tech dynamics, you can find her by the coffee machine, briefing co-workers on the perks of living a healthy lifestyle and how to achieve it